David Shariatmadari continues our writers' favourite film series with Milos Forman's opulent tale of Mozart and his rival
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There are films that take your breath away before they've even begun. The first four minutes of Milos Forman's Amadeus ? the credits, in fact ? contain more drama and pathos than many directors manage in 120. The scene is Vienna, a winter's night in the 1820s. From somewhere inside a grand apartment a man screams "Mozart!" as the snow billows outside. "Forgive your assassin!" He is answered, first by a great dismal chord from the last act of Don Giovanni, then by two servants, who are bringing the cream cakes they hope will shut him up, but end up breaking the down the door. Inside they find their master has slit his throat, blood spattered across his white tunic. As he is carried on a stretcher through the freezing streets he glances up at the windows of a ballroom. A dance is taking place where everything seems warm and bright and young. But the man ? Salieri, old and wretched ? is being taken somewhere quite different: to a lunatic asylum.
Despair, unintentional comedy, suicide and madness, shot through with the Sturm und Drang of Mozart's Symphony No 25 is quite something for an 11-year-old to absorb. I was stunned, really, but once I had recovered, I realised I'd be glued to the TV for as long as it took for this tale to unfold. And as with the very best childhood experiences of storytelling, Amadeus immersed me in another world. It was a feeling I became determined to cling to and after the broadcast, having badgered my parents to buy the video and the soundtrack, I watched it over and over again, wearing out the magnetic tape until the picture resembled an impressionist painting. After that, I didn't see it again until a screening of the "director's cut" in 2002. I was pleased to find it was just as exciting as before, still a feast for the eyes, ears and mind.
But the word "sumptuous" doesn't quite do Amadeus justice. The streets of Vienna are meticulously recreated and filled with a seemingly limitless supply of costumed citizens. Parts of several operas are staged, lavish performances within a performance, with choreography by Twyla Tharp and sets by Josef Svoboda. The production design, by Patrizia von Brandenstein, was rewarded with an Oscar. It's a slightly hallucinatory interpretation of late 18th-century Austro-Hungarian splendour, complete with vertigo-inducing wigs, flaming candelabras and heaving bosoms.
And the music. Neville Marriner conducted the Academy of St Martin in the Fields in performances that must have introduced millions to the passion and intensity of Mozart's symphonies, operas, and finally, his great requiem. If the film weren't so good in and of itself you could accuse Forman of cheating ? of piggy-backing on the composer's genius. He certainly uses it to sublime effect: the recurring Don Giovanni chord, the aria Martern aller Arten, the first strains of the Lacrimosa. But just as central to the success of this film is the character conjured by F Murray Abraham, a performance that you feel deserves not just the Oscar it won, but several more on top. It is a brilliant, humanistic portrait of jealousy, guilt and, in the end, a kind of redemption. Abraham plays both the young and old Salieri, and never was there a more convincing handling of the same character at different stages of life. Eat your heart out, Brad Pitt, Julianne Moore et al.
Underpinning all of this is a myth-like narrative of ambition, obsession and searing jealousy, for which we have Peter Shaffer (and ultimately, Pushkin to thank. Amadeus weaves a beautiful, tragic fable, enchanting to children and adults alike. It has gore, a pact with God, celebrity, a masked stranger, murder and some of the best music ever written. What other film offers half as much?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/dec/20/my-favourite-film-amadeus
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